Thursday, December 29, 2005

Number's Up!

My new game to stave off senile dementia is to find a number of the week. It's only being running for a few weeks and recent winners have included:

20: The percentage of Third World debt directly created by the arms industry selling weapons to impoverished African states.
2311: The number of indecent child porn images found on Gary Glitter's computer by the Vietnamese authorities.
58: The percentage of the London Underground that is not actually underground.

Today's winner, though, is 25. That is the amount in seconds I managed to stay upright on a surfbaord in a one-hour lesson. It was a glorious British sporting triumph. Well, for 25 seconds anyway...

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Tis The Season To Be… Sunburnt?

‘Merry Christmas. I’m so glad we married as I’ve been the luckiest girl in the world to spend my life with a loving, generous and genuinely caring man like you…’

That, of course, was the greeting I was hoping for on Christmas morning as me and the missus woke up to a scorching Xmas day on the Gold Coast in Australia. Instead I got the following:

‘How come you found coathangers and I didn’t get any, you bastard?’

The missus was looking in the wardrobe at her relative’s house where we staying Down Under at the time and, after I told her I’d simply asked her 10-year-old nephew if I could nick some of his, her line of inquiry ended. Still the anticipated moment of festive romance was forever ruined…

Christmas is Oz is a strange affair. Our week in Sydney visiting friends had been fab and included a walk up (up and not over) the Sydney Harbour Bridge, then we flew up the coast to a place near Surfer’s Paradise for the remainder of our stay to bunk down with relatives. But walking around in swimming trunks and jumping in the pool or surf around Yule just doesn’t seem very familiar to one brought up on English Christmasses.

So I’ve decided to spend then rest of the stay walking around in several layers of clothes and complaining about the weather. It may seem crazy but it will be good practice for our eventual return home…

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Christmas Down Under

Tomorrow myself, the girl and the boy are off in Oz for just over two weeks for our first proper holiday of the year. (OK… our first proper holiday of the year if you don’t count long weekends away in Austria, Hungary and Spain and I don’t.)

We’re now pretty much packed and we even have a house sitter to feed the cats so, touch wood, all should be OK on the home front in our absence.

But even though it’s a holiday – and I fully intend to rest up and recuperate properly from several recent martial arts injuries – I am taking my laptop as I want to get some writing done and a 24-hour flight seems like a good place to do it.

I am having another stab at writing some sketches, which may well turn out to be utter rubbish, and I also want to make some major headway with a new play about a disgraced faith healer, which could be very good.

I may, however, also decide ‘Bollocks to all that!’ and just chill out on the beaches of Sydney (first week) and Brisbane (second week) with the girl and the boy.

Anyway, merry Christmas and a happy new year to anyone who reads this blog… Please take this joke as my present to you:

A bloke with a thing for lions goes to the zoo. He pays his money and heads for the lion cage but it’s empty so he walks around to look at the other animals but every cage he approaches is empty. Feeling ripped off he heads towards the gate to complain but as he does so he sees a small cage with a tiny little dog in the back. It was a shih-tzu…

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

New Order!

The missus is convinced I have finally cracked. I am currently colonising an area of the back living room as a new office and she watched me move my bits in last night with my usual methodical precision: books in size order, everything on the desk at right angles, music to work to sorted in genre order, a Stalinist purge of everything in the area that is not mine so I can properly call the place home…

I call this orderly and organised, she calls it obsessive compulsive disorder and who’s to say who’s right. Well she seems to think it’s her normally… The missus does resist all my best attempts to bring order to the household by doing ‘helpful’ things, though, like putting all her CDs in alphabetical order and arranging her books into author order.

But some people are just never happy and, as I pointed out, the various families on Honey We’re Killing The Kids on BBC 1 would be only too glad of somebody like me to bring order into their lives. Sadly, though, the powers at the Beeb invited somebody else to do it…

The basic premise of Honey We’re Killing The Kids is that each week family ‘expert’ Kris Murrin and her team meet a troubled family and aim to improve and put some order into their lives in just three weeks.

Last week’s clan, the Jacksons, featured harangued mum Teresa, 11-year-old daughter Shannon and 10-year-old son Steffan, a five-a-day-cigarette man who started smoking when he was five. Yes. That’s right. Five! But as mum is a 60-a-day woman he’d still got quite a lot of catching up to do.

The best bit of the show is when the troubled parents (or parent in this case) face a computer-simulated image of their kids as they are now and their kids as they will be in 40 years time if things don’t change. And poor Teresa didn’t like what she saw one bit...

Her incredibly bright daughter had become a dumpier version of her mum with no hope in her eyes and the marks of an underachieving and hard life etched all over her face, while the boy looked like a walking cadever battery-fed on McDonalds for 30 years.

Fortunately it all worked out quite well in the end as the kids made an effort to change and so did the mum.

And the result… Well the freshly generated computer images of the kids growing up under their new regime made them resemble smugly contented members of the middle class rather than the grunts they’d previously looked like.

The show is without a doubt decent telly but it’s awfully voyeuristic in a car-crash sort of way and is a bit self-congratulatory. Fact: some parents can’t always indulge their kids with time and affection because they’re working long hours in low-paid jobs to put food on the table. But let’s not let reality intrude on reality telly.

And always remember if you need help: I’m cheaper than the BBC. Ask the missus…

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Addicted to Love…

I am a sex addict. A moment hardly passes without some random sexually depraved thought entering my head. My condition can be triggered by a man or a woman and sometimes they don’t even have to be alive (like Carol Thatcher) to give me lewd thoughts. In fact it’s getting so bad that when either of the cats at home jump up on the bed when I’m dozing they are taking several of their nine lives in to their paws because they may get penetrated to death by my subconscious actions!

This, of course, is a lie (the cats move too quickly when I try to grab them) but sex addiction is apparently a proper disorder and people are treated for it. Honest! Of course it’s usually high-profile stars like Michael Douglas who get sex addiction treatment but now even the common folk are getting in on the act.

Last night’s The Dark Side Of Modern Love season on Channel 4 featured the documentary Sex Addict, which followed a married couple embarking on a quest to deal with hubby Mark’s all-consuming sexual compulsion.

Mark’s addiction had got so bad that he was spending thousands of dollars on phone sex chat lines, shagging several other women and even cranking his handle up to three times per day every day. And wife Connie was understandably quite (pardon the unfortunate choice of words) jacked off by all this. For a start it was costing her a fortune in tissues…

So our not-so-loving couple visited a sex therapist, himself a recovering addict of 18 years, where a mix of goofball psychology, religious instruction and hitting things with a cushion apparently helped him get better and her deal with her anger over his behaviour.

It was both bizarre and pitiful to watch and you’ve got to wonder:
a) Why she put up with it;
b) How he got away with it;
c) Why they agreed to make a TV show about it and expose their humiliation to the telly-watching world.

But I guess it takes all sorts. Just ask Mark – and our cats...